


Anyone Else

by quigonejinn



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 08:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and she means it.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anyone Else

**Author's Note:**

> See the "Author Chose Not to Use Warnings" up above? That is there for a reason.

Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and she means it: she doesn't remember her biological parents, and she moved down to LA when she was eighteen because the aunt who raised her died. She has no natural ties. She has no connections except the ones she makes. On the other hand, Pepper is good at making connections. For example, she makes friends with Coulson. She is one of the few people that Natasha actually likes, and she talks about art and New York and urban planning with Steve.

Even Nick Fury bends a little with her.

"How is your nephew?" Pepper says, smiling.

"Fury has a nephew? Fury has family?" Tony says, incredulous.

"Hush," Pepper says. She turns back to Fury. "Did he like his birthday present?"

Fury gives Pepper a small smile.

Pepper is very, very good at getting people to open up to her.

...

Pepper lives with Tony when they're in New York, and when they stay in the same hotel suite if they're traveling, but she insists, insists on keeping her condo in the Pacific Palisades. It's pretty close to Tony's house on Point Dume, and she is, she explains to Tony, really fond of having a place of her own.

"What do you mean a place of your own?" Tony gestures. "You've got a whole Sta -- Avengers Tower here in New York. And the one in DC."

"I own 12% of this one," she reminds him. "18.43% of the one in DC. My condo is 100% mine, plus I have an undivided 1.17% interest in the common elements of the development."

Tony makes an annoyed noise, and Pepper takes the opportunity to snag the last piece of tuna sashimi. They're sitting shoulder to shoulder in front of the reconstructed window on the main floor of Tony's penthouse suite on top of the Sta -- Avengers Tower, looking out over Midtown lit up in front of them, brighter than the night sky. Pepper's feet are in Tony's lap; Pepper has in her lap the critical path schedule for an overhaul of the Stark Industries campus in Long Beach.

Tony leans over and kisses Pepper under her jaw; Pepper's hair is pulled back loosely, so that strands hang down over her neck. She tells Tony that he's tickling her, but she doesn't tell him to stop or push him away. There is a small smile tucked into the corner of her mouth that's closer to Tony. Tony puts his arm a little closer around her, slides a little closer, and Pepper can't stop smiling, and Tony can't seem to stop smiling either.

Pepper is very, very good at remembering facts and figures.

...

Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and she means it: this is an absolute truth. Who else can she trust?

...

Pepper remembers that when she was eighteen, she moved down to Los Angeles. She lived in a shitty little apartment near Koreatown and worked at a series of decreasingly shitty temp agencies while going to night classes to fulfill her credit requirements towards California accountant qualifications. She needed practical experience; she needed something pay the bills. She moved from an apartment in Koreatown to one in Calabasas to one in Westwood, then buying the place in the Palisades two years after starting to work directly for Tony, and Pepper remembers the sheer, clean pleasure of sitting down on the floor in sweatpants and a t-shirt, looking at the walls, and knowing that if long as she paid her mortgage and condo dues, the place was hers for life.

Even after she moves in 90% of the way with Tony, Pepper keeps her place in the Palisades.

_Potts, what do you remember of your life?_

In the morning, Pepper swings by her condo in the Palisades to pick up the mail and air the place out; as she locks up, she notices her new neighbor moving into the apartment across the way. The door is half-open from movers coming and going, and as Pepper steps into the elevator, she gets an impression of afternoon sunlight pouring through one of the windows. Boxes. Not much furniture.

...

"Where'd you get this scar?"

Pepper has her head on Tony's shoulder, and she reaches her hand up behind her left ear, touches where Tony is touching. She frowns. "I've got a scar there?"

"Yeah, right here," he says. He kisses her on the forehead. Pepper smiles; she puts her head back on Tony's shoulder, then closes her eyes, happy.

...

" -- trying to say, Tony, is it isn't a normal way to celebrate life events. I mean, fireworks?"

"If it makes you feel better, the first time, I made 'em myself," Tony says, grinning. "I got Rhodey to help me sneak into the stadium beforehand. He didn't know that was what he was doing -- he just thought it was a weather balloon or something, but I set them off the next day at the football game."

"At the -- "

"At the Harvard/Yale game, yeah. There were seven Senators, two Cabinet members, and a four-star general whose kid was playing." He grins. "You know what the fireworks spelled out?"

"I don't even want to know."

"BEAVER FOREVER."

Pepper stares at him.

"MIT's mascot is -- "

Pepper had, in fact, already been aware, in an abstract way, that MIT's school mascot was a beaver. Instead, she just looks at Tony for a long, long moment: they're lying in bed together, Pepper wearing a t-shirt, and Tony wearing sweatpants but no shirt. Their legs are tangled together; through the window, Pepper can pick out the lights of the houses on the other side of Point Dume, and Pepper thinks about telling him about how most kids celebrate their fourteenth birthdays. Cake. Balloons. A party in the basement with wood-paneled walls and some nervous spin-the-bottle, not --

She doesn't say anything , though. Tony just looks so happy. Does Pepper know how hard it was to figure do that? This was, like, 1986. He hadn't built JARVIS yet. He had to do all the math on, like, _punch cards_. This is why he built Dummy and Butterfingers in the first place, so that they could precision-pack surplus Army artillery shells with capsules of magnesium and copper filings. It was _hard_. She has no idea how many test runs he had to do to get the _B_ in _Beaver_.

Pepper can't help laughing at this point, and because she is laughing, Tony starts to kiss her: because Tony is kissing her, Pepper lets go of a piece of sadness she didn't know she was holding.

...

In the morning, Pepper swings by her condo in Westwood to pick up the mail and air the place out; as she locks up, she meets her new neighbor that moved into the apartment across the way. Boxes. Not much furniture.

"Still getting settled," he says, a little sheepishly.

Pepper grins at him, and he holds his hand out, introduces himself, then goes back to carrying boxes from the freight elevator.

"You're bleeding a little," he says, when they bump into each other in the stairs when Pepper goes back in -- she realizes that she left her sunglasses behind, and he has a box marked GUEST TOWELS in his arms. "Right above the ear.

Pepper reaches up and frowns when her hand comes away with blood.

"Must've put a hairpin in too hard or something," she says. "Thanks."

He considers her for a second, his face looking very still and sober, then says _No problem_ and goes into his own apartment.

...

One night, years before, Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and this is the absolute truth: when she is eighteen, she comes to Los Angeles with three hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-six cents in her wallet, plus a driver's license from the state of Washington, plus a duffel bag full of clothes. She checks into a motel that rents rooms by the week; she has to buy her first real-office-job-interview suit from a thrift store. The shoes are a size too small. They rub her heels raw, and Pepper is sitting in a bar in Silver Lake, laughing with the first roommate she ever split an apartment with in LA.

"To the best roommate I ever had," Lisa says, laughing. She doesn't have blue-tipped hair anymore, but she does still have the ring in her nose. Media consulting somewhere downtown. "Even if you did have to call your mom every single afternoon ever."

"My -- "

...

"My -- what?"

...

Pepper knows that she comes to Los Angeles with three hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-six cents in her wallet, plus a driver's license from the state of Washington, plus a duffel bag full of clothes. She checks into a motel that rents rooms by the week, and it feels like a century later that she comes back from cocktails in Silver Lake, turning up the long drive to the house. She drops her heels next to the door and walks, barefoot, through the house to the bedroom: the floor is cool, and even though she spends half of her time in New York and half of the rest in the air, traveling to current or future Stark Towers, Los Angeles is still home. She still spent -- years working in this house.

Still dressed, she lies down on Tony's side of the bed. It smells like him, which is to say that it smells like clean sheets washed by someone else's hands, mixed with the shampoo and soap that Pepper selects and the housekeeper buys, plus the grease removal stuff that Tony has down at the shop. He uses that because it's been around for the better part of a hundred years, and the mix of smells is comforting. Familiar, and at some point during the night, Tony comes to bed. When she wakes, Pepper is curled around him. Dawn is a streak of light on the horizon, and her arm is around his waist. If she opens her eyes and looks down, she can see the blue light of the arc reactor.

"It doesn't have to hurt unless you make it."

Pepper blinks, turns towards the voice, but finds that the room is empty.

Tony shifts in his sleep, and Pepper smiles down at him even though he'll never see it.

...

Three hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-six cents in her wallet, plus a driver's license from the state of Washington, plus a duffel bag full of clothes: Pepper pulls away from Tony in bed, makes herself a cup of coffee, and stands out in the patio, drinking it. Wind lifts her hair; cold makes goosebumps stand on her arms. Dawn is a slightly wider streak of light on the horizon, and there is an ache behind her left ear.

Pepper finishes her coffee, takes the mug back into the kitchen, and leaves her shoes from by the door: party shoes, heels. She doesn't need them, so she walks down, barefoot, to her car.

She --

...

"My -- what?"

"Your mother," Lisa repeats. "Listen, you told me this story about how you hadn't seen her for something like a decade, but you still needed to call back to where she was. I thought you told me once she was institutionalized and that was why you had to call back, rain or shine or middle of the shift."

Pepper stares at her, then reaches up and scratches behind her left --

...

Pepper drives to her condominium in the Palisades, parks the car, regrets not putting on a pair of shoes, but figures it's only -- what, six stairs up to her floor, and she is the third apartment on the right. So she goes up the flight of steps. She goes down the hallway, but stops in front of her door. The door isn't locked. In fact, it's a half-inch or so open, and she frowns. Hesitates. She puts her hand on the door knob, then listens intently. Nothing. No sounds, nothing to suggest somebody is turning her apartment over. Whoever it had been is gone now, right? She should go in and find out what the damage is. It could have just been the maintenance --

It's her neighbor from across the hallway, sitting in an armchair and turned toward the door.

Pepper stares at him.

"What are you doing in here?"

"You're expecting me," he says and points.

Pepper follows the pointing hand: she looks down and sees that in her left hand, she is carrying a pair of coffees from the drive-through place a half-mile away. Her mouth opens, and now that she thinks about it, she has a memory of pulling up to the drive-through. Paying with a credit card. Trying not to yawn while they got it for her.

Her neighbor smiles at her in a way that looks genuinely friendly, and then, there is a moment where nothing happens: Pepper's mouth is open. Pepper stares at him, and he smiles back at her. The scar behind her left ear --

Then, a number of things happen very quickly.

...

What does Pepper Potts remember about her childhood?

Pepper is very good at remembering facts. Remembering numbers. They used to make a joke out of it in accounting. _Potts, what was the total adjusted gross income number for the holder of the third-tier LLP interests?_

_Potts, what do you remember of your life?_

...

What does Pepper Potts remember about her childhood?

Tony asks her this one night about six months into Pepper working for him. He says it's because he imagines that as a kid, she was exactly the way she is now, but smaller. He makes a gesture with his hands to indicate _smaller_ , and Pepper ignores him because she is trying to assemble a press package due in, oh, thirty minutes ago.

"No, seriously, where did you grow up?"

Pepper doesn't lift her eyes from the page. "Security vetted me before Obadiah let you hire me. Ask them."

Tony feels like an asshole when he asks and finds out that Pepper was raised by her aunt. Her mother -- standing in his workshop, Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and Tony believes her, not only because he has seen the security file containing a copy of her birth certificate with _Unknown_ for her birth father, not only because he has seen the copy of her mother's death certificate made out by the morgue doctor in a mental institution in Minnesota, closed for years by the time Pepper starts working for Tony, and then a fire got the rest -- but because he can see the subjective fact of it on her face.

...

A number of things happen quickly.

Pepper tries to throw the hot coffee at the man, figuring it'll be good to slow him down, but he side steps both the coffees and the tray. Instead, moving faster than she can really think about, he closes the distance. With his right hand, he grips her left wrist, and when Pepper takes breath to scream, he puts the fingers of his left hand into her mouth, pressing her tongue flat. She tries to bite him, but finds that the --

"You know that doesn't work on me," he says, and out of the corner of her eye, Pepper sees him close the door with his foot. He doesn't let go of her wrist. The pain is intense, but Pepper isn't sure why she doesn't get up. Her legs won't obey her. If she stands up now, she might be able to get the balcony before he can stop her. She could scream. She could kick.

Then, he flexes the fingers that he has in her mouth. "Don't even think about it, little one. You know this hand could tear your tongue out before you blinked twice."

Pepper makes a muffled noise under the fingers, and he shifts his grip a little, so that he is standing directly behind her.

"Do you remember me?"

Pepper is terrified, but when he pauses, actually waits for her to respond, she shakes her head. Again, the noise she tries to make is muffled.

He breathes out against her ear; she can feel his chest move against her back. "They did good work on you. I didn't think it was possible to forget."

At the word _forget_ , she bucks up against his hand, but he holds her at the wrist and in the mouth. In fact, he slides that hand back far enough into her throat that she gags; he pulls his fingers out just enough so that she doesn't actually throw up.

"This doesn't have to hurt unless you make it," he says, and with his lips against her ear, he starts to sing an old-fashioned lullaby in a language that she doesn't immediately recognize.

There is a pop inside Pepper's head.

...

Pepper is --

...

Pepper is sitting on a couch with Tony, looking at architectural plans for the clean Stark Tower in San Francisco.

....

Pepper is sitting on a couch with Tony, looking at architectural plans for the clean Stark Tower in San Francisco. Tony leans over to grab Sheet 3 from the coffee table, and Pepper slides her hand down into the place between the seat cushion and the seat back. When Tony turns back to her, sheet in hand, she jabs Tony in the side of the neck with a hypodermic needle -- it isn't easy to hit the artery. It takes skill. It takes training; it takes practice.

Pepper doesn't have to find the spot: some muscle memory knows where it is. She didn't need much reminding, and she knows, too, how to angle her wrist to depress the plunger.

The needle contains a cocktail of chemicals, including a fast-acting full-body paralyzing agent. Tony blinks at her stunned, for a moment, then tries to call for Jarvis. He doesn't get a reply, because Pepper deactivated Jarvis. Tony gave her that authorization after one time when Jarvis interrupted them at, ah, a tender moment to tell Tony that his simulation for the new armor had finished running -- Pepper had insisted. Pepper doesn't remember insisting; Pepper does remember temporarily disabling Jarvis, and slowly, Tony tips over onto the side of the couch. Pepper gently rolls him onto his back so that he is facing the ceiling.

Tony can feel her breath on his skin; Pepper thinks she should be crying. She is definitely still trying to hold the hypodermic.

He tries to form words, but the paralyzing agent is spreading, and he finds that breathing is starting to become difficult.

...

"You were ambitious," the brown-haired neighbor says. They're sitting in Pepper's apartment; he is sitting in the armchair, and she is on the couch. He is drinking his coffee, but Pepper's is untouched on the table. "Your kind always are."

"My kind?"

"You know," he says, smiling. "Over here, they called it -- " He says a word in another language, and Pepper realizes they've been speaking in Russian. He says _Black Widow_ in English, though.

"You haven't heard that term?"

Pepper shakes her head. "Not in that context."

After a moment, Pepper realizes that her cute brown-haired neighbor is using his right hand to methodically peel the skin back from his left hand, but it doesn't appear to hurt. It doesn't seem to make any kind of reaction in him, and the majority of her brain isn't surprised at this, either.

"I have to take the skin off sometimes," he says. "It gets in the way of delicate work, but this is why your biting wasn't going much use. Do you remember?"

Pepper looks at him for a second, then shakes her head a second time: he doesn't seem to mind that even after the trigger, though, there are still holes in her memory. Instead, he brings a hypodermic needle and a series of bottles out onto the table. "This is what you're going to use," he says. "I'm going to remind you how to use them."

Pepper has no context, but she remembers a cold room with a tile floor. She was naked; she was younger; there was blood running down the floor towards the drain and covering her forearms up to the elbow.

She doesn't remember fear. She doesn't remember pain. She remembers a fierce sort of --

...

"Do you remember choosing this mission?"

Pepper doesn't know how to respond to that.

...

Tony can't move his head anymore, but out of the corner of his eye, he sees the door open. A man comes in. Brown hair. He is carrying a black bag in one hand and a cloned Stark Tower ID card in the other. He closes the door behind him, and he comes over to the couch. He pulls a long, metallic implement from the bag.

"You're going to have to help me," he says to Pepper.

Pepper helps him roll Tony face-up onto the floor. The man straddles Tony's chest, and there is the brief smell of burning fabric. Then, there is a click. At a look from the man, Pepper puts her hands on Tony's shoulders to keep them flat on the ground.

The arc reactor comes out of Tony's chest with a sucking noise.

...

What does Pepper Potts remember about her childhood?

Pepper remembers snow. Pepper remembers ice. Pepper remembers bits and fragments of a long, cold rooms lined on two walls with bunk beds for girls; Pepper doesn't remember what happened to the girls in the other bunks, but she remembers the room with the tile floor and blood, where she begged. She remembers, possibly, before going into the chamber, she had brown hair: what does that even mean? Before going into the chamber?

Even after the brown-haired man activates her with an old Russian lullaby with a few key phrases switched, she doesn't --

Pepper Potts is older than she looks. Pepper Potts has no story of herself, no coherent memory of any emotion before she comes to Los Angeles with three hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-six cents in her wallet.

_Black Widow. Your kind._

Pepper remembers standing at the foot of the arc reactor with Tony hanging off the side of the window above One layer of her mind was terrified, but there was a cold, quiet core that judged time and space and her potential course of action.

Pepper remembers that she is very, very good at getting people to open up to her.

Pepper remembers that she is very, very good at recalling facts and figures.

Pepper tells Tony that she doesn't have anyone else, and she means it: who else can she trust?

...

Here is another memory that Pepper has:

"Where'd you get that scar?" Tony asks, gesturing.

Pepper reaches her hand up behind her right ear and frowns. "I've got a scar there?"

"Yeah, right here. It's like the third time I've asked you about it."

Pepper shrugs and kisses him on the mouth, open-mouthed, and Tony puts his arms around her. They're in the master bedroom in Tony's suite at the Stark Tower, and there is shattered glass on the floor and a very real ceiling crack that makes structural integrity dubious, but they're alone, and they're together, and Tony came back out of the wormhole alive, so Pepper is laughing and climbing on top of Tony and kissing him and unbuttoning her blouse, and --

...

The last things that Tony Stark sees and hears, before the neurotoxin irrevocably destroys his higher cortical function, is the man picking up the bag with the arc reactor in it, then kiss a sobbing Pepper on the cheek. He puts his arm around her waist. He tells her she doesn't need to cry anymore. The hard part is finally over. They can go.

He repeats, with concern in his voice, something in Russian.

Pepper nods, but takes it as the order it's meant to be. She starts sucking down deep, desperate breaths to keep from crying. She succeeds; she goes strangely, suddenly, completely silent. The man is pleased, so he holds his hand out.

Pepper, still taking deep breaths, still staring at Tony with tears standing on her cheeks, takes his hand.

They go, and the world goes black.

...

Pepper Potts has no memory of human feeling before she was eighteen and came to Los Angeles with three hundred forty-three dollars and eighty-six cents in her wallet, plus a driver's license from the state of Washington, plus a duffel bag full of clothes.

Six hours after killing Tony Stark, the human feelings that make up Pepper Potts go black, too.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is part of an informal Five Things that Haven't Happened to Pepper Potts (Yet).  
> 2\. Does this read like it has [Destronomics's](archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn/works) fingerprints all over it? Good. BECAUSE IT DOES.


End file.
